DevOps has become a digital transformation strategy for many organizations. It is about software development and operations teams working together and engineering and automating their practices. This will lead to writing codes for small changes and test and deploy those small changes very rapidly. This was an amazing step forward and a wonderful software practice.

Why Need GitOps?

But now, in the modern environment, we’re facing even more challenges. We need software applications to work at an amazingly large web-scale and deal with microservices, containerization, and service mesh. In this modern world of containers and Kubernetes, the applications need to scale up the infrastructure running when the load is high. And when there’s no load, it needs to scale down and do this all dynamically in a very complex way across many applications and microservices.

To address these modern operational challenges, GitOps comes into play. Before I talk about GitOps, let me tell you what Git is and what Ops is briefly.

Git is a distributed version control system where we manage our source code. It can have text, certificate, or configuration files. We maintain all these files using Git, and we also use it for collaborating with different team members.

Ops term comes from the same DevOps term, where we used to do release, deploy, operate, and monitor applications as a part of the operations.

What is GitOps?

GitOps is a process that is used for the continuous deployment of a cloud-native application. This process is developer-centric, which uses a developer-friendly tool like Git for operating infrastructure. Git here is the single source of truth for all the infrastructure and application deployment automation.

It is an operational framework, and it takes the DevOps best practices used for application development. These are version control, collaboration, compliance, CI/CD, and it applies them for infrastructure automation. In a nutshell, GitOps has three main components.

It is a combination of infrastructure as code (IaC), merge requests as your agent of change, and CI/CD automation.

Benefits of GitOps

Below are the benefits of using GitOps in your organization:

• Better Developer Experience: It helps developers use a very familiar tool like Git to manage Kubernetes with ease without even knowing its internal details. It increases the productivity of newly onboarded developers as well.
• Reliable: With the help of functionalities in Git, such as rollback, it is effortless to revert to a stable release in case of any meltdown reducing the recovery time drastically.
• Consistent: The end to end workflow of GitOps is very consistent as infrastructure; one model provides application, Kubernetes management, everything.
• Faster Deployment: It helps you deploy applications faster than before by integrating the continuous deployment automation with a feedback control loop.
• Self-documenting Environments: You can get a complete history of every change on the system and all the details of what was deployed by checking out the master branch. It helps in easy collaboration with other teams or shares enough knowledge with a new member.

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